Building batteries and bridges

By Erik VanceThursday 14 June 2012

With moral and monetary support, including a UC Proof of Concept Grant, two UC grads have formed a company to create 'printable' batteries that are efficient, environmentally friendly and could be made as small as a postage stamp.

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If you want to get a recent Ph.D. on the phone, it’s usually
not too hard. Just call down to a post-doc laboratory and ask for the person
who hasn’t been outside in two weeks.

Christine Ho, however, is tougher to catch. Perhaps that’s because
as co-founder of a startup called Imprint Energy, she is traveling between
meetings with potential investors and her new laboratory and manufacturing bay.
Ho is that rare creature – a student inventor who managed to bridge a great
idea into a fledgling company.

It all began in 2007, when she took a break from her Ph.D. at
UC Berkeley for a three-month fellowship in Japan. Since her undergraduate
years, she had been working on a project funded by the California Energy
Commission (through the Center for Information Technology Research in the
Interest of Society, or CITRIS) to develop tiny wireless sensors to make
buildings more energy efficient. Her focus was a new type of tiny battery that
would be easy to make and reduce the negative impact batteries tend to have on
the environment. The problem was that standard lithium-ion batteries are made
from rare Earth materials. Plus, they've been known to explode in one's laptop.

So, she went to Japan for a fresh perspective. However, the
lab she was in had neither tools nor the money for lithium-ion battery work. So
she changed course.

“We decided to look at zinc technology, which is the oldest
type battery chemistry you can think of,” she said. “A majority of our cheap, disposable
batteries are made of zinc.”

In the battery world, a scientist using zinc is like a car
manufacturer investigating horse-drawn carriages. Zinc batteries are fine for
cheap throwaways, but today’s market is all about rechargeables and you can’t recharge
zinc.

Perhaps because zinc had been so ignored, Ho found it was
ripe for revolutionary thinking. The reason zinc batteries cannot be recharged
is that inside their watery acid chambers they form ugly cone-shaped dendrites on
the metal electrodes. Eventually, these growths prevent the battery from
working.

“I had a very negative view of zinc batteries prior to
Christine’s work. And so does the rest of the world,” said Jim Evans, a UC
Berkeley electrochemist and Ho’s advisor. “The zinc electrodes deteriorate over
time. You may start off with nice flat zinc and before too long it develops holes
and dendrites and all kinds of nastiness.”

Yet Ho realized that zinc is (a) plentiful, (b)
environmentally benign and (c) not prone
to explosions. The only problem was the dendrites. But, she reasoned, if you
can’t change the zinc, why not change the electrolyte? She replaced the battery’s
liquid with a polymer film — similar to plastic but far more conductive — and
eventually created a new zinc battery.

When she went to recharge it, not only did it work, but it
worked again and again — more than 200 times. Better yet, because it didn’t have any
dangerous chemicals to house, it could be as small as she wanted. Better still,
she could build them with little more than an ink printer.

In most research stories, this would be the end. Ho would
get a pat on the back, a Ph.D. and a few lovely papers recommending further
research. The gap between innovative research in the university and products
that serve society is so wide it's often called “The Valley of Death.”
Every year, countless brilliant ideas are lost because there is no mechanism to
bring them into the market.

But that’s not what happened to Ho’s “printable” batteries.
Moral and monetary support — including contest prize dollars and a significant
grant from the UC Office of the President — juiced her battery project,

With encouragement from the California Energy Commission and
CITRIS, she met with a few potential investors and enrolled in a class in the
Haas Business School called Clean Tech to Market. The class paired promising
inventors with business, law and engineering students to discover go-to-market
strategies. One of her partners was a MBA student, Brooks Kincaid, who
coincidentally had gone to high school with her.

After the class ended, the pair got back together and
decided to enter her batteries in a Berkeley
Venture Lab competition put on by the College of Engineering’s Center for
Entrepreneurship & Technology.

“We got $7,500,” she said. “That wasn’t a lot in the grand
scheme of things, but it was a lot to us at the time. It just got the ball
rolling. We thought, ‘Maybe we can really do this.’”

They entered more competitions like the UC Berkeley Business
Plan Competition (where they won in the Energy track) and even a global entrepreneurship
competition. By 2011, they had raised $75,000, and so they started Imprint
Energy.

With the help of another advisor, professor and
manufacturing specialist Paul Wright, she and Kincaid devised a way to
manufacture batteries the size of postage stamps, using the same technology to pattern
silkscreen T-shirts.

“It’s like a multi-deck sandwich,” said Wright. “In the
printing industry, in magazines, to get all the colors to line up when you are
doing multistage printing, that is very difficult. It’s the same thing for this
kind of manufacturing.”

With the grant, they were able to conduct the research that
would increase manufacturing capability from eight batteries a day to more than
a 100 a day. They also addressed ways to make production of the batteries safer
for workers and less hazardous to equipment and consumers. Quickly, their idea
indeed developed into something marketable and potentially valuable to society.

Thanks to the many UC programs to help entrepreneurs get
started, Imprint Energy is in business — literally. They have hired five people
and look to bring in a few more by September. They have solid seed money from
what Ho calls “a large chemical company” and have moved off campus to their own
facility in Alameda.

In April, at a forum in which UC Proof
of Concept program grantees presented their innovations to industry and
technology venture capitalists and government agency representatives, Ho was a hit. After her presentation, she met with several people interested in the new
batteries.

Ho said the transition from university to actual markets is
tough. Originally she imagined her printable batteries in tiny wireless devices.
But in the real world, she and Kincaid have to narrow down an existing market
and specific existing customers within that. She said that never would have
happened without all the support she got. In many ways, Imprint Energy is not
just a new type of battery but also a new type of bridge — one that spans the
Valley of Death.

“There is this phrase, ‘If you invented a better mousetrap the world would beat a path to your door,’” said Evans. “And I think that is sheer nonsense. It may never have been true. It’s always necessary for people who come up with these great discoveries to work very hard to interest people in investing, becoming customers, even just to take the idea seriously. So, no, the world does not beat a path to your door.”